6fusion, CME Group Sign Letter of Intent to Explore Development of IaaS Exchange

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6fusion, the company standardizing economic measurement of IT infrastructure and enabling a global marketplace for buyers and sellers, has signed a non-binding Letter of Intent (LOI) with CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, to explore the development of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Exchange. Under the terms of the LOI, 6fusion and CME Group will work together to explore the development of an open marketplace for trading financial contracts based on 6fusion’s Workload Allocation Cube (WAC). In establishing this marketplace, 6fusion will utilize an electronic trading platform provided by CME Group, and 6fusion’s Marketplace platform will track fulfillment of physically delivered contracts traded on the platform.

“6fusion has overcome the technical barriers to establishing compute as a tradeable commodity,” said John Cowan, 6fusion CEO and Co-founder. “Working with the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives exchange, we are setting a course to develop a robust spot and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market for cloud computing based on 6fusion’s innovation.”

“As a leader in derivative markets, CME Group is pleased to work with 6fusion to explore the idea of a new electronic marketplace for trading spot and derivative financial products based on the WAC,” said Bryan Durkin, CME Group Chief Operating Officer.

The WAC is the industry’s first patented benchmark to universally measure consumption and capacity of compute, network and storage resources. The WAC makes it possible for buyers to standardize the quantification of IaaS requirements, which makes it simpler to determine the infrastructure type, quantities, and pricing that best match requirements across heterogeneous suppliers in the marketplace.

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6fusion and CME Group believe that an open marketplace supported by the ability to trade verifiable IaaS contracts could solve important business problems and open significant new opportunities for industry participants. According to Cowan, “IT infrastructure represents one of the largest and most obvious immovable assets from the balance sheet of global 2000 companies and emerging Internet businesses. An open marketplace enables buyers with the tools to mitigate risk in their positions, while opening up access to new routes to market for cloud operators.”

“An IaaS exchange could unlock enormous potential for buyers, sellers, and brokers,” said William Fellows, Vice President of Cloudscape at 451 Research. “The normalization of supply and demand quantification performed by 6fusion combined with the trading execution venue provided by CME Group has the potential to seriously disrupt the market.”

“6fusion’s Marketplace represents the foundation of how we intend to develop this market,” said Rob Bissett, EVP Product Management at 6fusion. “It is the global platform that serves up the core technologies to buyers and suppliers, and reconciles physical delivery of contracts traded on the electronic trading system to be provided by CME Group,” he added.

Buyers and suppliers can begin to leverage 6fusion’s technology today by signing up to the 6fusion Marketplace beta at www.6fusion.com.

About CME Group

As the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, CME Group (www.cmegroup.com) is where the world comes to manage risk. CME Group exchanges offer the widest range of global benchmark products across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, metals, weather and real estate. CME Group brings buyers and sellers together through its CME Globex® electronic trading platform and its trading facilities in New York and Chicago. CME Group also operates CME Clearing, one of the world’s leading central counterparty clearing providers, which offers clearing and settlement services across asset classes for exchange-traded contracts and over-the-counter derivatives transactions. These products and services ensure that businesses everywhere can substantially mitigate counterparty credit risk.

CME Group is a trademark of CME Group Inc. The Globe Logo, CME, Globex and Chicago Mercantile Exchange are trademarks of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. CBOT and the Chicago Board of Trade are trademarks of the Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, Inc. NYMEX, New York Mercantile Exchange and ClearPort are registered trademarks of New York Mercantile Exchange, Inc. COMEX is a trademark of Commodity Exchange, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Further information about CME Group (NASDAQ: CME) and its products can be found at www.cmegroup.com.

About 6fusion

6fusion standardizes the economic measurement of IT infrastructure, enabling a single global marketplace for buyers and sellers. 6fusion quantifies supply and demand for compute resources across heterogeneous public and private environments with the world’s only patented metering algorithm, the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), and an open platform for access to global IT infrastructure markets.

Whether an enterprise optimizing internal infrastructure, a data center provider transforming a cloud offering, or an IT service provider differentiating their business in the cloud, 6fusion enables organizations to deliver topline and bottom-line visibility and value to drive meaningful business outcomes.